August 31, 2012
A post-factual age
From New Statesman:
"We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers."...Mitt Romney.
Romney pollster Neil Newhouse admits that his party has given up on telling the truth.
In a related story:
Paul Ryan made his big speech at the Republican National Convention, and ThinkProgress summed it up best: "An energetic, post-factual speech by Ryan." Time and again, Ryan mislead, misspoke, and made "Demonstrably Misleading Assertions". If you're interested in the politics of it, he's also been attacked on style – Mother Jones' Kevin Drum recalled Harrison Ford's famous snipe to George Lucas, "you can type this shit, but you sure can't say it" – and doubtless, his "John Galtesque" evocation of the mythical grey, socialist hellhole of Obama's America will win over some. But if Ryan gets away with some of what he said, political discourse in the United States has a lot to answer for. The most egregious of Ryan's statements was an attack on Obama for failing to protect a General Motors plant in his constituency:
A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.
Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.
The plant's closure was announced in June 2008, over six months before Obama was inaugurated. Ryan probably knows this, because on 3 June, he issued a statement bemoaning the closure.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 05:51 AM | Permalink
Comments
“I believe that if our government is there to support you …"
Why does Obama say things like that? They only give ammunition to the right and inflame the culture war. Jeez, I'm a Canadian centre-leftist (a pinko commie in American terms), and even I have never felt that the government was there to support me and my job.
The rightwingers aren't eloquent, their insults sputtering all over the map, but you can't deny that they're reacting to something real and visceral and, indeed, vaguely "socialist."
Posted by: Angling Saxon | Aug 31, 2012 10:04:19 AM
Nothing sweeter than blaming the victim, is there Saxon?
Posted by: Ray Butlers | Aug 31, 2012 10:45:37 AM
Don't worry, the outlaw Josie Wales showed up as chair man.
No previous presidents bothered to attend.
Posted by: Dredd | Aug 31, 2012 10:54:11 AM
"chair man" he he
Love,
Invisible Obama
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/blogsoutofcontext/54803114-64/romney-trib-convention-speech.html.csp
Posted by: Ray Butlers | Aug 31, 2012 12:20:32 PM
To Republicans, their authoritarian epistemology is about belief and faith. Whatever the bona fide authority say is so: is so. No more question asked, no evidence needed. This is something the rest of us find difficult to understand, those of us whose epistemologies are rooted in skepticism, with rigorous examination of the evidence, again and again, before we accept an proposition as valid. For Republicans, if you hold the Holy Conch, what you assert is a mater De Fide for all true Republicans. Can the rest of us deal with that?? I cannot, and will resist to the grave. Their philosophy is a terminal mental illness.
Posted by: c4Logic | Sep 2, 2012 5:03:48 PM
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